This was quite the culture shock, coming from the UK where tabloids routinely declare all sorts of personal and shitty things about celebrities and get away with it. I’m not really sure about the two beside Claudia – I think maybe it’s Nathalie and Helena – but we’re all going out for team-building drinks tomorrow night, so I’ll figure it out then.

Everyone is dead quiet but the hum of traffic floats in from outside. I reach for my cup of coffee and take a sip.

‘So, my darlings,’ Hyacinth begins, dragging out the word: daaaarlings. ‘Who would like to take the floor first?’

‘Me,’ says Stan-who-has-my-dream-job.

‘Great, Stan,’ Hyacinth says. ‘What have you got?’

‘I think it’s time to run my Femicide piece,’ he says.

When he says ‘Femicide’ I immediately think of some graffiti I saw in Montparnasse soon after I arrived in Paris, in the space between unpacking and starting this job. I’d gone to see the grave of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre; I’d taken a photograph of the lipstick marks on their tombstone and uploaded it to Instagram. But on my walk home, there was this stone wall with the black spraypainted words: ‘une femme est tuée tous les deux jours en France’. It stayed with me and I looked it up later that night. And it was true: a woman is killed every two days in France. I’m not sure how that compares to the rest of the world but it sounds like a lot.

‘All the leads on Matilde Beaumont have dried up,’ Stan continues. ‘According to my sources they’re about to close the case. People forget. And then it happens again.’

Stan takes special care to linger on the word ‘sources’ and there’s a reason for this. The police in France don’t trust the media as a rule, and keep us at a distance, not even using us to gather information from the public. So press reports are cobbled together from leaked information and snippets from whoever will talk to us. Thus, Stan thinks having a source at the police makes him special, and, well, it sort of does.

‘Stan, I appreciate your passion,’ Hyacinth snaps. I get the feeling they’ve had this conversation before. ‘It’s done. It’s been covered to hell and back. And, yes, it’s important, but it’s also a downer. People don’t visit The Paris Observer to hear about girls turning up dead. They want to hear about which restaurant to go to. What’s on at the ballet. That sort of thing. And we need people to read our magazine or nobody will pay to advertise. I’m sorry but the answer is still no.’

I’m not stupid enough to argue with her, but this is blatantly untrue.

People love to read about murder. Death. It helps to remind them they’re still alive. At least, I think that’s why I like it.

‘Right,’ Hyacinth continues with a big smile that is strangely scary because her eyes stay botox-still. ‘Who else?’